ANTHRAX Guitarist SCOTT IAN: 'It Doesn't Matter To Me What Other People Do Or Think'

John Parks of Legendary Rock Interviews recently conducted an interview with ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Legendary Rock Interviews: ANTHRAX was always known for pushing the envelope of what metal bands could talk about, even including legitimate social commentary in songs like "Who Cares Wins" or "Indians" or "In The Family". Do you still feel inspiration to write about such a wide variety of subject matter all these years later?

Scott: I'll tell ya when I'm done with this next record. [Laughs] I don't know, I really don't know. Once again, I don't think about it too much and I don't analyze it. I'm about four or five songs in, lyrically, on this album and if you asked me what I was writing about at this moment, I couldn't even tell you, because I finish things and then I move on. Once everything is written and we're actually in the studio starting to work on stuff is when I start to dig a little deeper into things. Right now I am so in the middle of it that I couldn't even tell you what I'm writing about, I'm trying to think of some of the songs I'm finishing and I can't even tell you a songtitle, which is pretty crazy, but just how it is when I'm actively in the middle of this process. It was the same when I did "Persistence Of Time"; I didn't know what the hell I was writing about when I was in the stages of writing that record. Only after the fact did I go back and look at it and go, "OK, this is where my head was at." It's a case of having a lot of ideas and then somehow breaking those ideas into the form of lyrics. That's always been a challenge but it's one of the things I really love about being in a band.

Legendary Rock Interviews: When you were taking those chances and talking about real-world problems, how often did it occur to you that you were operating out of the typical heavy metal lyrical vortex of sex, Satan and power, did other bands of the day make you aware of it?

Scott: I didn't care. It doesn't matter to me what other people do or think, the only thing I care about is what we do. I really, really don't care or think about what other people think about what we do and I never have since day one. I couldn't care because, as I've said before, if I really cared what everyone else thought, then we would have been a VAN HALEN cover band in 1981 and ANTHRAX would have never existed. I never cared and it just doesn't matter to me one way or the other, good or bad. I mean, recognition is awesome and I'm not saying I'm against that — of course, any kind of recognition for what we do is good, but it doesn't affect the way that I write or the way this band goes about things. At the end of the day, it just comes down to us dudes sitting in the room together and doing what we love and what makes us happy, which is all we've ever done from day one. That's the one thing with ANTHRAX that's never changed; there's only one reason really why we do this and that's just that it really makes us happy to write this kind of music and get the opportunity to play this kind of music. Anything that comes after that, good or bad, is cake. To me, the fact that we get to go play shows is still great; just that act of playing shows for me is the best part of being in a band, that two hours onstage is the greatest part of it all. The fact that we get to write songs and make records is just gravy on top of it all and reminds that people all over the planet love what we do, so I definitely don't take any of it for granted, but at the same time, it doesn't have any effect on how we do things.

Read the entire interview at Legendary Rock Interviews.